Their moralism and ours

What ‘woke religion’ reveals about secular morality (Part 1 of 3)

Is ‘woke’ a religion? The suggestion often involves an implicit syllogism. Put bluntly: woke is a religion, religion is stupid, therefore woke is stupid. The problem, of course, is that whatever you think about woke, religion is not stupid.

Whether God exists or not is beyond the scope of this essay. Suffice to say that throughout history, many of the greatest thinkers have not only believed in God, but thought deeply and with sophistication about religious ideas and doctrine. Many highly intelligent people still do. It’s worth remembering, too, that for a long time, the same was true of Marxism (albeit to a much lesser extent). And indeed post-war liberalism. Ideas that are unfashionable or even seemingly discredited today, or even just in certain circles, are not necessarily worthless or barren.

The tendency to write off the past and its thought as irredeemably wrong and benighted is one of the most unattractive aspects of the woke outlook itself. If critics take the same high-handed attitude – by dismissing woke as ‘a religion’ or indeed as ‘neo-Marxism’ – they implicitly cut themselves off from a vast inheritance of intellectual and moral resources, that, while flawed, are very far from spent. In fact, that inheritance is often an excellent source of critique of its alleged inheritors. Arguably, there is little worthwhile you can say by way of criticism of ‘Marxism’ that hasn't already been said better by an avowed Marxist, sometimes the man himself.

The same is even more true of Christianity, whose history can be read as one long struggle against ‘Christian’ heresies in all directions. Certainly, if you are looking for a critique of empty dogmatism, superstition and self-righteousness of various kinds, there’s a certain first-century Palestinian Jew you should really read up on. Of course, Jesus Christ did not put an end to these things, and neither have his followers, but that is why his message retains its force. The most powerful critic of ‘religion’ in the Western tradition is not Marx but Christ.

After all, when people say woke is ‘like religion’, they are not usually talking about activists’ surfeit of love and forgiveness. They mean one or both of two things. First, the woke outlook involves dubious and unproven beliefs. For example, that all racial discrepancies are the result of white racism, or that everyone has a gender identity independently of their biological sex. Second, it tends to involve highly moralistic judgements. Of all varieties of religion, it is Puritanism that is most often invoked (with fundamentalist Islam a close runner-up when polemically apt). Racism, colonialism and a litany of ‘phobias’ take the place of original sin. Woke activists seem to delight in ‘witch-hunting’ those who transgress against the new moralism. ‘Cancellation’ is an eco-friendly form of burning heretics at the stake.

Christianity against moralism

I’ll return in a later essay to the question of false belief. For the purposes of this one, what does Christianity have to say about moralism? A favourite verse turned against Christians who are deemed excessively moralistic is ‘Judge not, lest ye be judged’ (Matthew 7). Like any Bible verse, its meaning is easily distorted when taken out of context; in this case, as if it means anything goes. Abraham Lincoln once satirically applied the verse to slavery. Should we not judge and condemn that? In fact, Jesus was anything but a moral relativist: he was reminding his followers that God is the ultimate judge and will judge them too. (So be careful!)

There is much more to Jesus’ critique of religion than that, though. Like the Hebrew prophets before him, he condemned self-righteousness as much as more obvious sins (and he didn’t hold back on those). Jesus especially railed against those who ostentatiously prayed, followed religious laws and even gave to the poor for the wrong reasons. The hypocrites were flamboyant in their observance of these external religious forms, thinking that made them better than others and even earned them the favour of God. Jesus was not impressed. For him, true morality was not about scoring points – much less deducting points from anyone else – but about effacing one’s self and loving others. This is not primarily about politics, but it does have political consequences.

As the late American pastor and author Tim Keller put it in his book, The Reason for God, ‘In Jesus’ and the prophets’ critique, self-righteous religion is always marked by insensitivity to issues of social justice, while true faith is marked by profound concern for the poor and marginalised.’ This is clearly just as relevant to Christianity in the modern world. Keller described a paradox he observed when grappling with his faith as a young man in the 1960s: ‘The people most passionate about social justice were moral relativists, while the morally upright didn’t seem to care about the oppression going on all over the world.’

For Keller, the church was failing to live up to its own teachings, but political progressives lacked a sound philosophical underpinning for the causes they championed. The prevailing climate of relativism meant their passion for social justice had little to sustain it beyond their own subjective feelings. Keller found this to be a recurring theme in his later ministry in New York, but not because people there were personally relativistic or amoral. On the contrary, the bright young people he sought to evangelise had a keenly honed sense of right and wrong, and were often moved to moral outrage. The problem was that the wider, secular culture offered no satisfactory grounds for their moral intuitions. Keller’s Redeemer Presbyterian Church did offer those grounds, and began to flourish in Manhattan against all expectations.

Of course, the moral intuitions of millennials and Gen Z are still more likely to draw them to woke ideas than to conservative Christianity. Those ideas offer moral certainty and the satisfaction of being ‘on the right side of history’ without the need to embrace genuinely counter-cultural beliefs and standards. Not everyone feels the need for philosophical consistency anyway. But is the problem here really that woke is like a religion, or that it’s not enough like a religion?

Read on in Part 2.